


Interrupted Cadence

by maythefoursbewithyou



Category: Cricket RPF
Genre: Catching feelings when you don't do feelings, Light Angst, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 09:49:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13292295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maythefoursbewithyou/pseuds/maythefoursbewithyou
Summary: In the lull and the silence, he knows he’s not being honest with Adam, but in the same moment being more honest than he’s ever been. To anyone.In the lull and the silence, Adam has closed the centimetres between them on the couch.





	Interrupted Cadence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kiwialicat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiwialicat/gifts).



> Thank you so much @bananas for reading my final draft and providing reassuring feedback.

**One**

He can’t resist. Adam’s fighter, in a wifebeater, blue jeans and aviators, is just so... _punchable_. Even though the object of the video game, ‘Renegade Warriors’, is to beat up rival gangs – and the police – together, Mitchell is helpless in the face of such punchability. He turns his avatar (a ninja dominatrix, don’t even ask) on his partner-in-crime. 

‘Heyyyyyy! Friendly fire, friendly fire!’ Adam protests.

Just the reaction Mitchell was waiting for. He snickers. 

‘You cock!’ Adam says, petulantly. ‘I give up on your hipster retro Sega. I hope the pigs come in with machine guns and blow you to smithereens.’ He sets the control down.

‘Not likely. They’re no match for Shirelle’s whips and chains.’

Adam gets up from the couch, drawing himself up to his full height. ‘You want another cold one?’

‘Like you had to ask.’

As it happens, while Adam is in the kitchen shoving fistfuls of chips in his gob (and Mitchell can tell, because the crunch of crispy potato slices against teeth is unmistakably audible), the cops do descend into the fracas via helicopter, three of them, and one tasers Shirelle from behind while she’s trying to lasso the others’ weapons out of their hands with her whip. She falls to the ground robotically, budget 90s video game graphics making it look like a death drop. 

‘Crap!’ Mitchell stabs at each of the buttons in turn, hoping Shirelle will have a sudden resurrection. But the cops circle in and make mincemeat of her, while Adam’s avatar stands in the background, near a rubbish bin in front of a graffitti-splashed brick wall, occasionally jerking an arm as though someone has flicked his Sega control. Shortly, the cops shoot him up too, leaving him splattered against the wall, a large red blotch on his white singlet. 

Adam is watching, holding two brown, misted-up bottles between a thumb and two fingers. ‘Awww. RIP, Shiraz.’

‘Shiraz is wine, you twit. Her name is Shirelle.’

‘Same diff,’ shrugs Adam. ‘She was a pain.’

‘Dude, she was a dominatrix. She was _supposed_ to be a pain.’

‘Whatever. At least Rico was fuckable.’ 

Mitchell snatches one of the beers, as Adam seems to have forgotten he was meant to hand one over. ‘Fuckable? Pornhub isn’t cutting it for you anymore so you move up to... characters from ancient video games? Also, that is officially the gayest thing you’ve ever said.’ Adam had at least removed the lid, so Mitchell takes a drink from the bottle, letting cool fizz and yeasty lightness drop down his throat.

‘Kink-shamed again,’ says Adam, and sits back down on the couch. 

They fall quiet, and sip their beers.

‘Seriously though, Adam. Would you fuck a dude?’ Mitchell finds himself enunciating each word clearly, as though he’s trying them out for the first time, learning how they feel in his mouth. 

‘It’s no longer a matter of “would I”.’ 

Adam? A thousand questions fire up inside Mitchell, he’s all who, what, where, why, when, how, but all he can push through the gap in his mouth is ‘I...’

‘I what?’ Adam presses him.

Mitchell looks at the bottle between his hands, feels the cool damp against his palms. ‘Sometimes I wonder. What it would be like. I mean, I don’t think I’m gay. I’ve never been in love with a woman, but that doesn’t mean I’m gay.’

In the lull and the silence that follows him speaking these words out loud, images flash through his mind, from straight pornos he’s watched. Dicks, entering mouths, entering pussies, but always dicks. Torsos ridged with muscles. Armpit hair. Stubble. Narrow hips, thrusting.

In the lull and the silence, he knows he’s not being honest with Adam, but in the same moment being more honest than he’s ever been. To anyone.

In the lull and the silence, Adam has closed the centimetres between them on the couch. ‘Nothing wrong with wondering,’ he says. He puts his beer on the floor, and Mitchell’s too, and places a beer-chilled hand on Mitchell’s cheek, turning his face toward him. For a second, Mitchell meets his gaze, but finds he can’t hold it. His eyes drop, instead, to Adam’s wet pink lips. 

He can’t think for the clamour of his heart in his chest. He can’t think so he does the unthinkable. He kisses Adam, pressing lips against lips. He’s so surprised at himself that he doesn’t keep them there.

But it doesn’t matter, because Adam leans forward and kisses him back, and with both hands clasps him at the back of his neck, as if to just dare him to pull away again. It starts with soft caresses, but Mitchell feels something organic and right surge within him, like a perfect cadence resolving to close a song, and when Adam’s tongue searches for a gap between his lips, he parts them and lets him in.

Tongues and lips glide together, push and explore, while hands grab fistfuls of hair and trail each other’s necks. 

They kiss hard and fast until Mitchell feels himself awaken from whatever spell he’s been under, the amazement of finding out for the first time how _good_ a kiss can feel, and slows things down to a standstill.

He’s realised: it’s not even about ‘gay’ anymore. It’s about Adam.

‘So now you know,’ Adam says, simply. 

‘Yeah,’ Mitchell replies, half-smiling, but still quizzical, still perplexed by kissing, by the fullness of feeling inside him, by Adam. 

‘And?’

‘And I think we should do this again sometime. If you’re game?’

‘You know where to find me,’ Adam tells him.

Mitchell wanders back to his hotel room feeling so brand new that he forgets to take his Sega console with him.

**Two**

The next evening, Mitchell finds himself rapping his knuckles against Adam’s door. He tried to be patient, tried to put it all out of his mind for the day, but his memory kept snagging on the edge of last night’s kiss. Training was no help at all. Adam was so ridiculously there, and where else would he be? Mitchell’s always tried to be discreet when he admires his team-mate, but now there’s something else, a longing that Adam will notice his gaze and return it. And he did, just the once, with a smirk and a wink, as they crossed each other’s paths near the two yellow training stumps. 

It meant something, it definitely meant something. Adam is into him.

There’s no answer to his knocks though. It’s just after nine. Must be at a late dinner. He decides to text him instead, as he makes his way back to his own room.

_Hey. So I’m off to Aussie with the test squad on Saturday. Would be keen to revisit our fun last night before I go. Accidentally left Sega in your room so now I have an excuse to come visit *crylaugh emoji*._

There’s no response.

But, as it happens, when he’s at the vending machine near the smokestop doors that lead to the fire exit stairwell, later on, furtively buying skittles and chips, Adam swishes by him looking and smelling impossibly fresh and clean for this time of night. 

‘Mitchell!’ he beams. ‘Got your text mate. Yes, let’s hang out again before you go.’ He touches him warmly on the arm, just above the elbow. ‘I’ll text you, yeah?’

‘Yeah, ok,’ Mitchell grins back. He wants to say more, but Adam’s already moving on, halfway down the hall, and all that remains is for Mitchell to drink in the view from the back. Adam’s lean fasty frame, the contour of his back and shoulders in the cling of a t-shirt.

It’s a view he’ll picture naked, later, between the sheets of his hotel bed, cock in his hand, squeezing his eyes shut tight.

**Three**

Time and the Black Caps have flown on – landing two days later in another town. A tight win, a happy captain. One more victory will secure the ODI series.

But Adam hasn’t said anything to Mitch about another rendezvous. In 3 days, he’ll be going. There’s not much time left.

Mitchell can’t remember when it became so urgent. 

He’s been catching himself frowning in Adam’s direction, hopes he hasn’t been noticed with expectation etched in his brow. Adam’s spending a lot of time with Kane, and barely has a second glance for him. 

There’s no point in worrying about it, and yet, the unease in his belly is beginning to get in the way of his primary relationship with food.

He’s menswear shopping with Trent and Tim, feeling very much the third wheel and fingering his Samsung for comfort. Patience wears out. He can’t text Adam, it looks too... thirsty. But he can’t continue to let this situation run him ragged, either. 

_Run_ him ragged...

‘Nice tie,’ Mitchell says to Tim’s reflection in the mirror. ‘I’m gonna leave you guys to it. Need to see a man about a dog.’ After a thousand attempts, Tim still hasn’t mastered a half windsor, and Mitchell doubts this latest lesson from Trent is going to change much. 

Back at the hotel, once Mitchell is suitably attired in his sportwear, he leaves his phone behind and goes for a run. He winds his way through city streets, across parks lined with flowering pohutukawa, past traffic lights and parked cars, supermarkets and art galleries, in the general direction of the esplanade, and all the way along it, until he finds some walking track that takes him uphill to a lookout. It gives him scope of the Pacific, of tiny islands off the coast. His hotel looks miles away. He didn’t realise how far he’d run, only now notices the sun is lower and more westward in the sky. He’d better head back.

He had to walk the final 200-odd metres back to the hotel. There’s a rubbish bin back a ways, holding the bilious contents of his stomach, evidence that he ran too far, pushed himself too hard. 

In his room again. No messages.

He showers, cleans his teeth, freshens up for dinner with Todd and Ish. 

Still nothing from Adam.

Desperation be damned. He and Adam are friends, right? Friends text each other.

_Hey Adam, do you mind if I swing by your room sometime and pick up my Sega? I’ll need it with me over the ditch on those uncomfortably hot Aussie nights._

The spinners are poring over a dessert menu in the hotel restaurant when the response comes in. 

_Sorry Mitchell. I meant to catch up with you but Kane was worried about his form and asked me to do extra time in the nets with him. I’ll come by your room with the console after the game on Friday._

Friday it is then. Mitchell shoves his phone back in his pocket, and decides on key lime pie.

**Four**

The game comes and goes, and that night, in the dressing room, Mitchell watches Adam get really drunk and drunker with Doug. He thinks he knows how it might feel to be a bug under someone’s shoe. It’s clear Adam won’t come by tonight. Back in the hotel, he forgets to close his window, and as he lies awake, sighing thick like air escaping the neck of a deflating balloon, he is bitten by a mosquito. He registers the little sting as its proboscis pierces his skin, but he can’t bring himself to do anything about it.

In the morning, he’s ill-slept, mood distinctly uncharitable. And yet, a message from Adam comes through while he packs up his suitcase for his next flight, out of New Zealand. 

_I’m real sorry I missed you. Promise I’ll look after your Sega. Can we catch up when you’re back from Australia?_

It’s starting to look like a game. It’s got to be a game. Mitchell’s been right here, in the same hotel with Adam, for days. There’s been nothing but time and opportunity for Adam to make contact, to see him, if he really wanted to. And yet, Mitchell’s not so sure it’s that simple. He felt something, last weekend when they kissed, and he could swear he wasn’t the only one feeling it, and would bet it wasn’t all just in his head. 

Maybe Adam is freaking out on a scale to rival his own.

Still, leaving him hanging like this is uncool. He can't stand to be made a fool of, doesn’t matter how many years they’ve known each other. 

_Since last weekend you have time for everyone. I thought we were mates? Let me know when you’ve figured out what you want._

The last text Mitchell receives at the airport reads: _I know. I’m a dick. Of course we’re mates. Let me know when you’re back._

**Five**

_I can’t stop thinking about you._

_Me too *kissy face emoji*._

Then that’s it. No more contact from Adam, the entire month he’s away.

It’s not like he’s checking, but – yeah, he’s checking – Adam’s been active on Instagram the entire time, but hasn’t liked any of his posts. 

He’s been through every possibility in his head. Adam enjoys the power he gets from people being into him, so he milks it for all the ego-gratification he can get. Adam is into him, and he’s scared and confused about it, so he’s trying to distance himself. Adam has some major personal stuff going on, and he doesn’t want to drag Mitchell down with it. Adam is just a shady flake, and Mitchell should quit all this overthinking about him.

It’s no coincidence that Mitchell dreams about the Cadbury Flake song.  
‘Only the crumbliest flakiest chocolate/  
Tastes like chocolate never tasted before.’  
It fades in and out of the scene, ethereal choir and violins and reverb, as his dream-self supplicates before Adam.

‘Why aren’t you into me?’ he asks. 

‘If you’d fucked me that night, we’d be in a relationship right now, but you didn’t and we aren’t,’ Adam tells him.

‘Is that what I have to do to be with you? I’ll do it, Adam. If that’s what it takes.’ God, Mitchell hates his dream self for this. So weak. Not that his waking self has any balls either.

‘It’s too late,’ Adam says, and, like the Flake ad, recedes into nothing.

Knowing he’s an idiot, Mitchell sends Adam one more text when he returns to Hamilton. He receives a typically vague reply about catching up, and wonders why he let himself be played. It’s like he keeps hoping that whatever feelings he caught weeks ago have been mutual all along, that Adam is really into him, more than he wants to be, and that the balance of power will shift in Mitchell’s favour. That he can salvage some shred of dignity from this Big Fat Nothing of a situation. He also wants his Sega back, and he’s – hang on a second - pretty pissed that Adam won’t just return it to him. So many weeks have passed that it’d just be weird to broach the subject now, and he doesn’t know how he could bring it up without sounding petty and bitter. He resolves to just forget about the Sega, and act like he doesn’t care even though he’s downright vinegary over it. 

Autumn sneaks up out of it’s lair and casts firy hues and cool temperatures across the central North Island. Adam says he wants to meet up. Mitchell doesn’t reply. He deletes Adam’s number. 

He goes for a run.

**Author's Note:**

> The Cadbury Flake ad... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59M9dB2yumE


End file.
